Speaking at the company's financial results, Otellini insisted that Microsoft's forthcoming changes to Windows will actually help the company in the touch-enabled (tablet, PC and mobile phone) arena.

And he expressed his doubt that ARM can make an impact on the business PC area that makes the money for Intel.

"The plus for Intel is that as they unify their operating systems we now have the ability for the first time, one, to have a designed-from-scratch, touch-enabled operating system for tablets that runs on Intel that we don't have today; and, secondly, we have the ability to put our lowest-power Intel processors, running Windows 8 or the next generation of Windows, into phones, because it's the same OS stack. And I look at that as an upside opportunity for us," said Otellini.

"On the downside, there's the potential, given that Office runs on these products, for some creep-up coming into the PC space.

"I am skeptical of that for two reasons: one, that space has a different set of power and performance requirements where Intel is exceptionally good; and secondly, users of those machines expect legacy support for software and peripherals that has to all be enabled from scratch for those devices."

Intel is certainly in rude health in the mean-time, with the company announcing record fourth quarter results (including a $3.39 billion profit – around £2.1 billion) and making confident prediction for the first quarter of 2011.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Global Editor-in-Chief

Patrick (Twitter) is Global Editor-in-Chief for techradar, and has been with the site since its launch in 2008. He is a longstanding judge of the T3 Awards, been quoted or seen on everything from the The Sun to Sky News and is on the #CoolBrands Council. He started his career in football, making him one of approximately one journalists to have covered both a World Cup final and an iPhone launch.